Working hard, working long and working dangerous — films that tackle labor issues feel as vital as ever

Ron Leibman stars as a union organizer and Sally Field as a cotton mill worker in 1979's "Norma Rae." (20th Century Fox)

A young textile worker in the 1963 film “The Organizer” wakes up in the pre-dawn hours. The setting is northern Italy in the 1890s and there’s no running water. When he goes to pour a jug of water into the basin to wash his face, he finds it’s frozen solid and has to use a broom handle to break it into chunks. Then he shrugs, figuring a dirty face is better than a freezing one. Somewhere in the apartment one of his relatives complains that the coal won’t light: “The coal man pisses on the coal!” she says.

There are slivers of comedy here and there in writer-director Mario Monicelli’s film, but it is primarily a drama about Italian factory workers who strike for better working conditions. The movie was reportedly a favorite of Studs Terkel, the Bard of Workers himself. Clearly it’s a favorite of Facets as well, which brings the movie back every so often, including a screening Monday as part of its Teach-In movie discussion series.

Advertisement

I’ve been thinking about unions quite a bit lately with regard to Amazon. We click a button and two days later a package arrives, but at what cost to those who work in the company’s fulfillment centers? Earlier this week, the Tribune’s Ally Marotti wrote about Amazon’s interest in equipping its employees with wristband tracking devices which, even if they “don’t use GPS tracking, they could tell a company if a woman is taking longer bathroom breaks than co-workers or whether a disabled employee is moving more slowly.”

There has never been a shortage of movies about unions and labor issues, the two most significant being 1979’s “Norma Rae” starring Sally Field as a North Carolina cotton mill worker who organizes a union despite major pushback, and the 1976 documentary “Harlan County USA” from director Barbara Kopple, about a violent 1973 coal miners strike in Kentucky.

Both films were big players at the Oscars — Field won best actress; “Harlan County” won best documentary — but I can’t think of a labor film in the years since that’s broken through into the mainstream in quite the same way.

“Why did those two films kind of hit home? I think it’s really interesting that one of them is made by a woman and one of them is about a woman,” said Marilyn Ferdinand, a Chicago-based film writer who blogs at ferdyonfilms.com.

That’s an interesting observation, because so often when we talk about unions and labor organizers the subtext is that it is a very male space. And yet women — of all races and ethnicities — have had prominent roles in these stories. Next month PBS’s “Independent Lens” will broadcast the documentary “Dolores” about Dolores Huerta, who was as instrumental in forming the farm workers union as Cesar Chavez — even though his is the name most people know.

Reviewing “Dolores” for rogerebert.com, Matt Zoller Seitz noted that, “One of the film's more provocative aspects is the way it links U.S. opposition to labor organizations with the legacy of slavery, linking the treatment of predominantly Mexican-American farm workers in California to the plight of African-Americans from Reconstruction to the present. In an arrangement reminiscent of slave plantations and post-Civil War sharecropping, many of them lived with their extended families on property that they served while performing stoop labor for basement wages. As older veterans of early 20th century farm labor tell the filmmaker, physical and even sexual abuse were rampant on some of these farms.”

That last part? We’ve been hearing about a lot of those stories in various contexts lately. Consider this recent report from Sports Illustrated investigating the front office of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, where a hostile work environment “ranging from sexual harassment to domestic violence” was an open secret.

Closer to home, just this week women employed at a Chicago Ford plant told their stories of sexual harassment at a City Council committee meeting, and what’s important to note is that sometimes even when there is a union in place, problems can persist. One woman said she called the company’s harassment hotline and reported it to her union, the United Automobile Workers, but said nothing was done to help her.

A film that captures a similar sense of limbo is Paul Schrader’s “Blue Collar” from 1978 starring Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto as a trio of Detroit autoworkers getting squeezed by management on one side and their union on the other.

When Pryor complains to his union rep that his locker in the break room has a jagged edge that keeps cutting his finger, he’s told to settle down. Pryor just scoffs: “That’s all you talk about is the plant. Everybody knows what the plant is — the plant’s just short for plantation.” With its bluesy soundtrack, the film captures the look and feel of the greasy and sweaty factory floor, but also the perils of selling out and the inequities that emerge when race is factored in. All of this serves to drive a wedge among the three friends.

A real-life autoworkers strike in Flint, Mich., in 1937 is the subject of the little-known but tremendously entertaining documentary “With Babies and Banners” (available on YouTube) which focuses entirely on the efforts of wives and other women in the town to support the sit-in, which lasted well over a month. Forty years after the strike, filmmaker Lorraine Gray sat down with a number of the key players and it’s their memories of their own factory jobs that stand out.

Here’s one anecdote: “I love machines, any kind of machine,” a woman says. “But my husband, when I left (for the job interview) said, ‘Now if they want to offer you a job and put you on one of the big machines, don’t take it.’ I didn’t answer him because I knew I was going to take anything I could get because back then, he didn’t have a job. You know, either work or starve.”

Or this story: “There was no safety equipment of any kind. On the press I was on, the day girl lost two fingers. And they told everybody, ‘Don’t tell Nellie when she comes in, don’t tell Nellie.’ But about 15 told me before I got through the gates! When I went in, there was the fingers still laying on the press.”

Advertisement

Another tells of sexual harassment so pervasive, they “found out one whole department was being treated for venereal disease. And that was just because the foremen were using the girls, and holding it over their heads — that if they didn’t do what they wanted, they wouldn’t have a job.”